Portrait of a man with a lute

For a long time this portrait was placed in the 1530s, alongside the merchants and courtiers Holbein painted in London in that decade. Specialists including John Rowlands and Susan Foister have since moved it back to around 1526 or 1527, because it sits so close to two panels he painted in Basel in 1526, the Lais of Corinth and Venus and Amor, both now in the Kunstmuseum there. In 1526 Basel was split by the quarrels of the Reformation, church commissions were drying up, and by the end of that year Holbein had left for his first stay in England. So this man belongs to that moment of departure, though nobody knows who he was, or on which side of the Channel he sat. He holds a lute upright in one hand and a folded letter in the other, with an open book before him on a red-covered table. The oak panel is almost square, about 44 centimetres each way.